Games You May Have Missed — Yoshi Touch and Go

One of my favorite things to do is to track down old video games that I missed when they were released. Most of the time I find Super Nintendo or Game Boy titles, but recently I have been moving toward more GameCube, GBA, and DS material. Often times I overlooked these games because they didn’t look so great in previews, or I passed them up because I was too busy with other games. Once I end up discovering some of these overlooked gems, however, I wonder how I ever could have thought that they wouldn’t be worth my time.

Recently, one game that’s really struck me this way has been the sublime Yoshi Touch and Go for DS. Despite the praise that it receives here at 4cr from Nick Rumas, I’d never bothered with it until now. Five years later, I’m kicking myself over not trying it sooner.

The game opens with Baby Mario slowly dropping through the sky, hanging by balloons. Your goal in this first part is to gently guide Mario to the ground by drawing lines of clouds on the bottom screen, all the while collecting coins and dodging enemies. Once you reach the ground, you are rescued by Yoshi, and the second part begins.

Through the second portion of the game, your goal is to guide Yoshi and Baby Mario to the end of the level (in Score Attack mode) or as far as you can (in Marathon mode). All control is carried out via the touch screen. You draw paths of clouds for Yoshi to follow, tap on Yoshi to make him jump, and throw eggs by tapping on the touch screen in any direction. Collecting more eggs is accomplished by eating different fruits that are scattered across the play field. One touch by an enemy, though, and Kamek captures Baby Mario, resulting in a game over.

At first, I found myself wondering what the point of the first part of the game was, until I noticed that depending on the amount of coins collected, my Yoshi would be a different color. Different colored Yoshis can carry a different number of eggs, so you want to make sure you collect as many coins as possible in the Baby Mario drifting section. This added a bit more of a drive to that first part of the game for me. Luckily, if you have a good color of Yoshi and get a game over on the second section, you can just continue from the beginning of this part, keeping your color, and continue trying to get as high a score as possible. There’s also a multiplayer mode that I haven’t been able to try.

Trying to best your high score is really the whole point of the game — this competition with myself makes me want to try again and again. Luckily, each play-through lasts only a few minutes, making it not feel like such a setback to try starting over again. The more I play it, the more I realize that it would make an amazing DSiWare game. I would love a way to have this game always available on my DSi. It’s the kind of game in which you can’t help but saying to yourself “one more time” after every session.

I have a pretty sizable collection of DS games, but I always find myself coming back to the more ’simple’ ones like Zoo Keeper, Tingle’s Balloon Fight, and now YTAG. If you haven’t played it, do yourself a favor and find a copy on eBay or in your local game store. It’s bound to be cheap, and it won’t disappoint.